The airline’s social relations manager Kyle Thorne said: “Synthesio’s ability to offer us both listening and engagement within one intuitive tool was very appealing.

“Putting our customers at the heart of everything we do, treating people as individuals, and forging stronger connections with people who love our brand, is core to our success. When it comes to the social web, the Synthesio platform enables us to do this at scale.

“We want to continue to improve our understanding of all aspects of the customer experience and to use customers as a source of innovation and inspiration. Social intelligence delivers fresh insights and real-time opportunities to build stronger relationships.”

Synthesio’s platform also contains a built-in metric for measuring a company’s online reputation – Social Reputation Score – which many brands use to benchmark themselves against competitors, and measure the impact of their activities.

Synthesio founder and chief executive Loic Moisand said: “We are very excited to work with Virgin Atlantic. It is an iconic brand with a strong personality and a broad online fan base.

“They clearly care about understanding their customers and providing them with an exceptional experience and we’re looking forward to assisting them with this over the coming years.”